Introduction

When one day the head of Cicero was brought to them [sc. Antony and his wife Fulvia] — he had been overtaken and slain in flight —, Antony uttered many bitter reproaches against it and then ordered it to be exposed on the speakers-platform more prominently than the rest, in order that it might be seen in the very place where Cicero had so often been heard declaiming against him, together with his right hand, just as it had been cut off. And Fulvia took the head into her hands before it was removed, and after abusing it spitefully and spitting upon it, set it on her knees, opened the mouth, and pulled out the tongue, which she pierced with the pins that she used for her hair, at the same time uttering many brutal jests.

Cassius Dio 47.8.3–41

Like few other periods in (ancient) history, late-republican and early-imperial Rome pullulated with memorable personalities. The years that saw the fitful transformation of a senatorial tradition of republican government into an autocratic regime produced a gallery of iconic figures that have resonated down the ages: Julius Caesar (‘Cowards die many times before their deaths | the valiant never taste of death but once’), Marcus Tullius Cicero (‘But for my own part [what he said] was Greek to me’), Marcus Brutus (‘This was the noblest Roman of them all’), Gaius Cassius (‘Men at some time are masters of their fates’), Marcus Antonius, a.k.a. Mark Antony (‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears’), and Octavian, the future princeps Augustus (‘The time of universal peace is near’), have all remained household names, partly because they have continued to inspire creative individuals also in post-classical times — not least Shakespeare.2 They are certainly good to think with, evoking Big Issues and Ideas, such as Civil War and Dictatorship (Caesar), Republican Liberty (Cicero), Tyrannicide (Brutus and Cassius), Power and Love (Antony and Cleopatra), and Empire (Augustus).

Consisting of selections from Philippic 2, the text set by OCR offers an excellent introduction to, intervention in, and commentary on this period of turmoil and transition. Composed in the autumn of 44 BCE, the year of Caesar’s assassination, it includes a sustained attack by Cicero on Mark Antony, who was consul at the time — but whom Cicero suspected of aiming at autocratic power, another tyrant-in-waiting. Philippic 2 is conceived as Cicero’s (imaginary) response to the verbal abuse Antony had hurled at him in a meeting of the senate on 19 September, but was in all likelihood never orally delivered: Cicero unleashed his sh•tstorm as a literary pamphlet sometime towards the end of the year (late November or December). Further efforts followed, all aimed at pushing a reluctant senate and the people of Rome into a violent confrontation with Antony, whom Cicero deemed (and managed to transform into) Public Enemy No 1. But when political fortune swung, Cicero found himself on the killing list of a triumvirate comprising Antony, Caesar Octavianus (the future Augustus), and M. Aemilius Lepidus (‘a slight unmeritable man | meet to be sent on errands’).3 And thus the maestro of the needling tongue was heading for decapitation — and Fulvia, Antony’s wife at the time, made sure (or so Dio Cassius’ story goes) that the reprisal stuck also postmortem, pricking republican libertas and eloquentia to death. Against the orator who knew how to use his word as sword, the sword got the final word. (Or has it? Ask yourself: why am I reading Cicero on Antony, not Antony on Cicero…? And you also might want to challenge the all-too-easy binary between word / sword in other ways as well: arguably the warmonger here was Cicero, while Antony, too, had considerable talent as orator.)

Much, then, is at stake with this text, and it is not easy to do it critical justice. The ‘double whammy’ of Philippic 2 — ‘as on the one hand lengthiest and most hysterically warped, and on the other hand undelivered fake up’ — invites analysis from a range of perspectives.4 To begin with, the text is a historical document: the speeches are crammed full with facts and figures about the political culture of republican Rome and, more specifically, the changes that happened in the wake of Caesar’s victory in the civil wars and his rise to the dictatorship. This calls for some basic orientation about author, title, date, circumstances of composition, and whatnot (1). Secondly, the abusive pyrotechnics Cicero fires off in Philippic 2 should not blind us to the fact that the speech is carefully scripted rhetoric and repays close study as a literary artifact designed to intervene in a specific historical situation: it is meant to change (our perception of) reality, even though it would be a mistake to think that (m)any of the salacious secrets Cicero shares with us about (say) Antony’s supposedly sordid sex life have a factual basis (2). Finally, Cicero also conceived of Philippic 2 as a monument of eloquence and political activism designed to outlive its context of production — and invites us to consider his speech as enacting a mode of politics and as a personal manifesto of political eloquence that possesses trans-historical relevance and universalizing import (3).

1. Contexts and Paratexts

1.1 (Character) Assassination as a Means of Politics in Late-Republican Rome

The convulsive showdown between Cicero (berating) and Antony (beheading) is just one episode in a long series of violent confrontations between members of Rome’s ruling elite that eventually resulted in the collapse of the republican commonwealth. But the ‘extremist’ politics of Cicero and Antony (and their generation) that aimed at the complete verbal and/or physical annihilation of a peer-turned-enemy, was a fairly recent phenomenon in Roman history. While we should not imagine early and mid-republican Rome as a conflict-free zone where sober ancestors beholden to a set of peasant values practised consensual politics in happy harmony, the murderous savagery of civil warfare, so familiar from the last generation of the Roman republic, did not really take off until the second half of the second century BCE. True, narratives that bemoan a decline in personal and political morality began to circulate from c. 200 BCE onwards. This was (not coincidentally) the time when Rome’s imperial success and exploitation started to take off in earnest and resulted in increasing inequalities in wealth within Rome’s ruling elite, which opened up novel possibilities for specific individuals to accumulate degrees of wealth and political power difficult to accommodate within an oligarchic system. But one could do worse than single out 133 BCE as the moment in time when the fabric of Rome’s political culture first started to unravel violently: in that year, the pontifex maximus and ordinary senator Scipio Nasica, unaided by the consuls, took charge of the murder of one of the tribunes of the plebs, Tiberius Gracchus, and around three hundred of his supporters, on the suspicion that he aimed for tyranny.

In a commonwealth fundamentally grounded in power sharing, consensus politics, and default friendship among members of the ruling elite — but also with a pronounced ethics of revenge — the phenomenon of political murder proved deeply divisive.5 It was the moment when Romans first started to become deadly serious about turning ‘adversaries’ into ‘enemies’ — to use a distinction recently made by Michael Ignatieff.6 From then on, political measures designed to validate ‘extremist’ politics (such as the so-called ‘hostis declaration’, the decision to regard a Roman citizen as an external enemy), which amounted to the ‘othering’ of part of the self, coincided with repeated episodes of outright civil war. The series of violent clashes (Marius with Sulla, Caesar with Pompey, Cicero and the senate with Mark Antony, to name only the most obvious) only ended in 31 BCE at the battle of Actium between Caesar Octavianus and Antony and Cleopatra. This led to the establishment of the principate, an autocratic form of government prefigured, not least, by the dictatorships of Sulla and Caesar. Philippic 2 is an explosive exhibit of ‘the Roman culture of civil conflict’7  — composed in the brief period of republican revival that began with the murder of Caesar in March 44 and ended with the battle of Philippi in Northern Greece in October 42, where Antony and Caesar Octavianus triumphed over Caesar’s foremost assassins, Brutus and Cassius. Philippi sounded the ultimate death knell of politics in a republican key. Previously, Cicero’s Philippics, not least Philippic 2, arguably hastened along the final demise of the libera res publica by advocating a second act of (prospective) tyrannicide and pushing the senate into an armed confrontation with Antony that turned out to be ill-advised. (Savour the paradox!)

1.2 The Antagonists: Cicero and Antony

Born in 106 BCE, Cicero reached political maturity during the reign of Sulla (82–79 BCE), who first introduced proscriptions (the drafting of ‘kill lists’) into Rome’s political repertory, and lost his life in 43 BCE when the triumvirs resorted once more to the same measure (or, in the words of Seneca the Elder, Suasoria 6.3, when ‘Sulla’s thirst for citizen blood returned to the state’ (civilis sanguinis Sullana sitis in civitatem redit). The autobiography that emerges from Cicero’s oratorical self-fashioning throughout his career as a public speaker reflects the tumultuous historical context in which he was operating. The following six stages can be distinguished:

1. c. 81–66 BCE: in his early defence speeches Cicero adopts the stance of the inexperienced novice, who, in the name of justice, dares to speak truth to power and gradually rises to the top. This early period culminates in the speeches against Verres, who stood accused of imperial exploitation, through which he dethroned Hortensius (a part of Verres’ defence team) as ‘king of the courts’.
2. In his first political speech the De Imperio Gnaei Pompei or Pro Lege Manilia delivered in 66 BCE, the year he held the praetorship (the second highest political office after the consulship), Cicero promotes himself as the ‘new man made good’, who puts himself at the service of the commonwealth.
3. He follows up on this with the consular ethos (optimate or popularis, as the occasion demanded) he projects in the orations he gave during and shortly after his consulship (63–59 BCE) — the apex of his political ambitions, which tragically also resulted in his first devastating career break: in 58 BCE, Cicero was driven into exile for his illegal execution of the Catilinarians without trial.
4. Upon his return in 57 BCE, he tries to regain lost political prestige by adopting a ‘L’État, c’est moi’ [‘The state am I’] posture, starting with his two speeches of thanks-giving to the senate and the people for his recall and culminating in the pro Milone (52 BCE).
5. Soon after the pro Milone, Cicero left Rome on a pro-consular appointment in the Near East and returned just shortly before the outbreak of civil war. With a dictator in charge, Cicero turns himself into a principled republican, who struggles to find, but manages to assert, a meaningful voice in the presence of autocratic omnipotence: all three speeches he delivered before Caesar — the pro Marcello and pro Ligario in 46; and the pro Rege Deiotaro in 45 — testify to his republican convictions (but also his willingness to enter into dialogue with the dictator), though the mood of the orations progressively darkens.
6. After Caesar’s assassination, Cicero, in his Philippics (1–14, dating to 44–43 BCE), casts himself in the role of an ardent patriot, who tries to rally the senate and the people under the slogan ‘give me liberty or give me death’. Philippic 2 thus belongs to the last phase of Cicero’s career, leading up to — indeed helping to bring about — his murder.8

Born in 83 or 82 BCE, Antony, unlike Cicero, was not a homo novus:9 the gens Antonia belonged to the nobility (though was not of patrician origins). The most illustrious representative of the family clan was Antony’s grandfather, the eponymous Marcus Antonius (I), one of the consuls of 99 BCE and immortalized by Cicero as one of the two principal interlocutors in his dialogue On the Ideal Orator (de Oratore). The next generation failed to live up to his lofty standards: Marcus Antonius (II), son of Marcus Antonius (I) and father of our Mark Antony did reach the praetorship in 74, but soon after suffered a fatal career break because of military failure followed by bankruptcy. His brother Gaius Antonius Hybrida got chucked out of the senate in 70, though managed a comeback as Cicero’s colleague in the consulship in 63. Cicero quite literally bought his support against Catiline, not least by agreeing to swap pro-consular provincial assignments. But upon his return from Macedonia in 59, Hybrida was dragged into court for his approach to provincial government and went into exile. If Hybrida harboured significant sympathies for Catiline, Antony’s stepfather P. Cornelius Lentulus Sura, one of the consuls of 71, but (just like Antonius Hybrida) stricken off the senatorial register the following year, was one of Catiline’s ringleaders and among those whom Cicero had executed without trial.

Antony therefore had to overcome the failings of the previous generation of Antonii, but he could rely on the distinction of his grandfather and some family resources, which ‘included the large Antonian clientela and access to wealth, arising both from the family’s business interests in the East and from a possibly lucrative first marriage to Fadia, the daughter of a freedman’.10 His talents in the military sphere served as catalyst for a remarkable career. Antony first distinguished himself in service under Gabinius in the Near East (57–55), before joining Caesar in Gaul and becoming one of his most trusted lieutenants.11 With the help of Caesar’s patronage, he started on his cursus honorum in Rome, holding the quaestorship in 52 and the tribuneship in 49. The outbreak of civil war then turbo-charged his rise to the top: ‘In the first two years of the Civil War, Caesar twice deputed Antony to serve as his chief representative in Italy during prolonged periods of absence. Caesar did so first in April 49 when he set out for Spain to do battle with Pompey’s legions. From April until Caesar’s return in December, Mark Antony was granted pro-praetorian power by Caesar and entrusted with administering the whole of Italy, although at the time Antony was only a tribune of the plebs… A year later, in 48–47 Antony’s powers were even more sweeping. As Caesar’s magister equitum during Caesar’s extended absence in Egypt and Asia Minor, Mark Antony exercised control over all of Italy and Rome until Caesar returned in September 47’.12 In the following years, he was busy raising much needed cash for Caesar by ‘liquidating Pompey’s assets by resale’ — a ‘complex financial enterprise’ which he managed to carry off with aplomb and handsome rewards from Caesar in the form of further political offices and advancement.13

In the year of Caesar’s death, Antony was consul — but the assassination of his patron left him very much exposed: while he initially tried to reach a compromise with the conspirators and work towards a peaceful resolution of the simmering tensions between Caesarians and republicans, he soon came under pressure from Caesarian hard-liners, and in particular Caesar’s adopted heir Octavianus, who eroded his support among the veterans and other loyalists by adopting a strident stance towards the conspirators. To rally support, shore up his base, and increase his influence, Antony began to pursue a much more confrontational approach that included pronounced pro-Caesarian measures of his own — which brought him into open conflict with Cicero and set the stage for the Philippics.

Cicero did manage to forge an alliance against Antony, consisting of a reluctant senate (under his leadership), the two (Caesarian) consuls of 43 (Aulus Hirtius and Gaius Vibius Pansa) and their armies, and Caesar’s heir Octavianus (and his private army of Caesarian veterans); but his success was short-lived. By the summer of 43, Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus had formed their triumvirate and taken control of Italy. Cicero was one of the first — and certainly the most prominent — victim of their kill list. Despite their successful squashing of the republican opposition, the alliance between Antony and Octavian remained uneasy — and it ultimately broke down entirely in the late 30s BCE. In preparation for the final showdown, Octavian picked up where Cicero left off: with a wholesale propaganda war against the character and (its failings) of his adversary.14 At the centre of the effort stood the contention that Antony had lost his Roman ways and had fallen under the evil influence of the queen of Egypt, Cleopatra.15 After Antony and Cleopatra lost the battle of Actium against Octavian (and his general Agrippa), they fled to Egypt and ended their lives. Here is Shakespeare’s take (Antony and Cleopatra 4.15.52–70):

Mark Antony

The miserable change now at my end

Lament nor sorrow at, but please your thoughts

In feeding them with those my former fortunes,

Wherein I lived, the greatest prince o’ th’ world,

The noblest, and do now not basely die,

Not cowardly put off my helmet to

My countryman — a Roman by a Roman

Valiantly vanquished. Now my spirit is going.

I can no more.

Cleopatra

Noblest of men, woo’t die?

Hast thou no care of me? Shall I abide

In this dull world, which in thy absence is

No better than a sty? O see, my women,

The crown o’ th’ earth doth melt. My lord!

[Antony dies]

O, withered is the garland of the war,

The soldier’s pole is fall’n: young boys and girls

Are level now with men. The odds is gone,

And there is nothing left remarkable

Beneath the visiting moon.

For Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, at least, Mark Antony was the world. As we stride into the Billingsgate that is Philippic 2, it is worth bearing in mind that hardly any politician in history has otherwise been treated more unfairly…

1.3 The Philippics: Background, Dates of Composition, Corpus and Title

Quite a few historians argue, blessed with the benefit of hindsight, that the murder of Caesar simply arrested for a brief and bloody period of time the inevitable transformation of an oligarchic into an autocratic regime at Rome that had long been underway and was finally completed by Octavian. But for those living in the thick of things, the period after the Ides of March 44 was one of high crisis and contingency: everything was suddenly up in the air again, with all options on the table — a reconstituted libera res publica, centered in the senatorial aristocracy; a prolonged descent into civic bloodshed with uncertain outcome; the rise of another autocrat.16

Cicero, for one, was overjoyed at Caesar’s assassination (even though he did not seem to have been partial to the conspiracy). But disillusion quickly set in. Antony’s behaviour in particular started to grate on him — and he began to suspect him of trying to assume Caesar’s mantle. Already in April, Cicero gloomily toyed with the idea of leaving Rome for Athens, to visit his son and sit out the year of Antony’s consulship in self-imposed withdrawal from active politics (Att. 14.10.1 = 364 SB; 19 April 44). But soon after he had finally departed in the summer, he changed his mind and decided to return to Rome (Att. 16.7 = 415 SB; 19 August 44).17 He arrived back in the capital on 31 August and, finding that the main item on the agenda for the senate meeting the following day was ‘Honours for Caesar’, sent in his apologies, claiming that he was too worn out by travel to attend. Antony, who was behind the motion of heaping further honours on the dead dictator, took this as a personal insult and furiously attacked Cicero in absentia during the meeting. Cicero replied at the senate meeting on the following day (2 September) with an oration that would become his first Philippic and constitutes a masterpiece of passive-aggressive insinuation.18 Antony stewed on this over the next fortnight or so and then burst into a tirade against Cicero during the senate meeting on 19 September. Philippic 2 pretends to be a spontaneous riposte to Antony’s vituperations (with Antony still on hand to be put on the spot — in fact, it was Cicero who was not present on the day!), but was actually composed and edited in the aftermath of the meeting. In Philippic 5, Cicero himself gives an account of the verbal sparring between himself and Antony in September 44 (5.19–20):19

Huc nisi venirem Kalendis Septembribus, fabros se missurum et domum meam disturbaturum esse dixit. Magna res, credo, agebatur: de supplicatione referebat. veni postridie: ipse non venit. locutus sum de re publica, minus equidem libere quam mea consuetudo, liberius tamen quam periculi minae postulabant. at ille homo vehemens et violentus, qui hanc consuetudinem libere dicendi excluderet … inimicitias mihi denuntiavit; adesse in senatum iussit a. d. XIII Kalendas Octobris. ipse interea septemdecim dies de me in Tiburtino Scipionis declamitavit, sitim quaerens; haec enim ei causa esse declamandi solet. cum is dies quo me adesse iusserat venisset, tum vero agmine quadrato in aedem Concordiae venit atque in me absentem orationem ex ore impurissimo evomuit. quo die, si per amicos mihi cupienti in senatum venire licuisset, caedis initium fecisset a me; sic enim statuerat.

[If I did not come here on the Kalends of September (= 1 September) he said he would send workmen to vandalize my house. Important business was on the agenda, I seem to remember: discussion of a public thanksgiving! I came the following day (= 2 September): he himself didn’t. I spoke on the commonwealth — less freely, for sure, than I am accustomed to, though more freely than his threats of danger warranted. Then this man of vehemence and violence, who wished to ban this custom of free speech, … declared me his personal enmity and ordered me to be present in the senate on 19 September. Meanwhile he spent seventeen days declaiming about me in Scipio’s villa at Tibur, seeking to work up a thirst — his usual reason for declaiming. When the day on which he had ordered me to be present came, he entered the Temple of Concord with his bodyguard in battle formation and vomited from that foulest of mouths a speech against me in my absence. If my friends had allowed me to come to the senate on that day as I wished, he would have started his slaughter with me; that was his resolve.]

Cicero here mocks Antony’s rigorous rhetorical exercises in the run-up to the rant he unleashed on 19 September. But at least Antony delivered his speech in person — unlike Cicero. While posturing as an impromptu response, Philippic 2 is, rather, a long-deferred written response, carefully drafted (and edited) over several weeks and (as far as we can tell) never orally performed in the senate.20 Cicero attaches a draft of the oration to a letter to Atticus written on 25 October, wondering when (if ever) the moment for wider circulation might come (Att. 15.13 = 416 SB):

orationem tibi misi. eius custodiendae et proferendae arbitrium tuum. sed quando illum diem cum tu edendam putes?

[I am sending you the speech, to be kept back and put out at your discretion. But when shall we see the day when you will think proper to publish it?]

By 5 November 44, Atticus had read the speech and sent Cicero some comments, suggestions, and criticisms to which Cicero responded in turn.21 Overall, then, as Sussman (1994: 54) puts it: ‘the characterization of Antony was painstakingly premeditated and the speech itself is a consummate piece of craftsmanship’. At the same time, the long process of gestation also shows how difficult it was for Cicero to find a voice (and make it heard). Even the final product, if one reads between the lines of the invective bluster, shows up Antony as a frightfully powerful adversary, capable and competent in equal measure, a power broker of the first order — if perhaps no Julius Caesar. Indeed, ‘maybe the only glove that C really lands on him is the easy shot of billing him as a JC clone, one helluva disappointment after the real thing’.22

1.4 The Wider Corpus and the Title

Cicero finally disseminated the text more widely in late November or early December.23 He was now fully committed to three interrelated objectives: to drag a reluctant senate into a military confrontation with Antony, whom he configured as the new tyrant-in-waiting; to act as self-appointed mentor of Octavian, who was courting Cicero as an influential establishment figure, and thereby ensure his support for the traditional order; and most importantly to restore the senatorial regime to power.

Over the next few months, Cicero weighed in with twelve more speeches against Antony.24 On 20 December 44, he addressed both the senate (Phil. 3) and the people (Phil. 4) and did so again on 1 January 43 (Phil. 5, to the senate; Phil. 6, to the people). The remaining eight Philippics were all delivered in the senate: Phil. 7 (mid-January 43), Phil. 8 (4 February 43), Phil. 9 and 10 (both in early February 43), Phil. 11 (end of February 43), Phil. 12 (beginning of March 43), Phil. 13 (20 March 43), and Phil. 14 (21 April 43). All seem to have been published rapidly.25 The last intervention occurred just after news had reached Rome of the battle of Forum Gallorum near Mutina (14/15 April 43). While the ‘senatorial’ alliance that Cicero helped put together against Antony won this encounter as well as a follow-up battle on 21 April at Mutina, the victories turned out to be Pyrrhic: soon after, Caesar Octavianus switched sides and Cicero was history.26 By choosing Philippics as the label for his last oratorical efforts, he preternaturally seems to have known where he was heading.

The name Philippics alludes to the corpus of speeches that the Athenian orator Demosthenes (384–322 BCE) delivered against Philip II of Macedon (382–336 BCE), the father of Alexander the Great, who threatened to invade the Greek peninsula from the North and ‘enslave’ the Greek city-states, in particular Athens. He realized his ambitions after winning the battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE, and Demosthenes’ oratorical efforts against Philip acquired an iconic status as an eloquent stand on behalf of liberty against tyranny and oppression. In the 40s, Demosthenes more generally had become a prominent point of reference for Cicero’s theorizing on oratory, and he began to think of himself as the Roman equivalent.27 The label Philippics for the set of speeches against Antony deftly extended the affinities he felt with Demosthenes to the sphere of politics and helped to endow Cicero’s endeavours with historical prestige. It suggests an analogy: just as Demosthenes fought for the freedom of the Greeks against Philip, the Macedonian tyrant, so Cicero was fighting for the freedom of the Romans against Mark Antony, the would-be tyrant of Rome.

When, precisely, he started to conceive of the speeches against Antony as a thematically unified set in conscious imitation of Demosthenes’ resistance to Philip II is impossible to reconstruct; it certainly happened while the corpus was still evolving, but seemingly some time after the initial two interventions were first drafted. In a letter written to Cicero (Brut. 2.3.4 = 2 SB; 1 April 43), written after perusal of Philippic 5 and 7, Brutus praises Cicero for his spirit (animus) and his genius (ingenium) before signing off on the label Philippics that Cicero himself had proposed, half in jest (because of its potentially presumptuous implications): iam concedo ut vel Philippici vocentur, quod tu quadam epistula iocans scripsisti (‘I am now willing to let them be called by the name of ‘Philippics’, as you jestingly suggested in one of your letters’).28 In the letter to Atticus that accompanied a draft of what would turn into Philippic 2, Cicero does not yet use the label, though one could argue that the speech already manifests a Demosthenic flavour: ‘in the Philippics, beginning with the Second Philippic, one sees the first genuine attempt on Cicero’s part to imitate Demosthenes’ use of style and argumentation. After Antony’s furious attack on him in the senate on 19 September, Cicero realized that reconciliation was not possible and that he was engaged in a death struggle to preserve the only form of government in which he himself could function effectively (cf. Letters to Friends, | 12.2, 1). Moreover, Antony had attacked Cicero’s whole career, as a politician, as an orator, and as a man; and Cicero realized that his reply had to be a defence of his entire life. Less than two years before, Cicero had put his hand to a Latin translation of Demosthenes’ speech On the Crown. He had already come to think of himself, both as an orator and as a politician, in terms of Demosthenes’.29

You may want to ask yourself: does this analogy mean the speeches were pre-destined to make a posthumous hero out of Cicero (as they did of Demosthenes) but also doomed to seal permanent political failure? Though unlike Demosthenes’, Cicero’s Freedom Speech couldn’t even turn up and make its Big Moment. Even within its own corpus, Philippic 2 is unusual: ‘the speech is in fact something of an anomaly within the collection as a whole. Its function as invective means that it contains little of the deliberate style of oratory found elsewhere in the Philippics; and with a total of 119 sections it is more than twice as long as any of the other speeches’.30 See also Wooten (1983: 156): ‘… the primary aim of Philippic II is to establish firmly the character of the major participants in the conflict, very much like the first speech in the second action against Verres. As in this speech and as in Demosthenes’ Philippics and Olynthiacs, narrative is used to discredit the character of the opponent. There is nothing in the speech about what actions should be taken to oppose Antony, nothing about Cicero’s own political program, no rational analysis of the situation. Emotional appeals are used to galvanize Cicero’s supporters, and vilification of character is used to set the stage for the exposition of the specific proposals that Cicero would eventually make’ (from the third Philippic onwards).

Its special status raises all sorts of questions: do the rest of the speeches step around or recycle it, only this time for real in the public spaces of the city? Has Cicero integrated Philippic 2 in with the rest or does it stick out like a surgically removed thumb? Might it be the dustbin for everything he didn’t get into the rest — highlights too juicy to chuck away?

2. The Second Philippic as a Rhetorical Artifact – and Invective Oratory

As we have seen, then, Philippic 2 is anything but an impromptu outburst by an irate orator who had just been raked over the coals and ridiculed in front of his peers. It is, rather, a deliberate and highly literary act of retaliation, composed (and revised) over several weeks and released in cold blood at an opportune moment (when Antony was no longer present in Rome). Despite the craftsmanship, the overall structure of the speech, however, is deceptively simple and straightforward:

§§ 1–3: exordium [= preface, introduction]

§§ 3–41: Cicero’s defence of himself

§§ 42–43: Transition (attack on Antony as orator)

§§ 44–114: Attack on Antony

§§ 115–119: peroratio [= conclusion]

After the exordium, Cicero responds to the abuse that Antony heaped on him in the speech of 19 September. We can gather from his rebuttal that Antony seems to have charged him with a lack of honour that manifested itself not least in his failure to live up to the obligations of friendship and his ingratitude towards Antony, who claimed to have saved Cicero’s life (cf. Phil. 2.3–10). Cicero’s consulship must have come in for ridicule — as well as the epic poetry he afterwards composed about it (cf. Phil. 2.11–20). Antony even seems to have found a way to blame Cicero for the death of Clodius, the outbreak of civil war, and the assassination of Caesar (cf. Phil. 2.21–36). And he mocked the low level of esteem in which (he claimed) Cicero was held in Roman society (cf. Phil. 2.40–42). After a lengthy rebuttal of this battery of charges and a brief transition, Cicero turns the tables on Antony: what Antony blamed on him, he now blames on Antony — and more. The speech concludes with a defiant peroration, in which Cicero expresses his unconditional commitment to weather the crisis of the commonwealth caused by Antony’s perceived power grab — albeit by sacrificing his life for the sake of Rome’s freedom.

Throughout, Cicero keeps his text aligned with the fiction that it is a spontaneous response to Antony’s discourse.31 In generic terms, Philippic 2 follows the conventions of oratory with a strong invective bent. Both of these terms — oratory and invective — are worth a closer look.

2.1 Oratory at Rome

The orator, operating in the domestic political sphere (domi), complemented the imperator, who was in charge of affairs outside the city (militiae). While military accolades, in particular the celebration of a triumph, outshone any other achievement, to be an esteemed public speaker was part of the portfolio of distinctions to which members of Rome’s ruling elite aspired. Pliny’s summary of the speech that Quintus Caecilius Metellus gave for his father Marcus in 221 BCE includes the assertion that dad could lay claim to the ten greatest and best achievements, which men with smarts spend their lives pursuing (Pliny the Elder, Natural History 7.139–40):32

Q. Metellus in ea oratione quam habuit supremis laudibus patris sui L. Metelli pontificis, bis consulis, dictatoris, magistri equitum, xvviri agris dandis, qui primus elephantos ex primo Punico bello duxit in triumpho, scriptum reliquit decem maximas res optumasque in quibus quaerendis sapientes aetatem exigerent consummasse eum: voluisse enim primarium bellatorem esse, optimum oratorem, fortissimum imperatorem, auspicio suo maximas res geri, maximo honore uti, summa sapientia esse, summum senatorem haberi, pecuniam magnam bono modo invenire, multos liberos relinquere et clarissimum in civitate esse.

[Quintus Metellus, in the speech that he delivered as the funeral oration of his father Lucius Metellus the pontiff, who had been consul twice, dictator, master of the horse and land-commissioner, and who was the first person who led elephants captured in the first Punic War in a triumph, has left it in writing that his father had achieved the ten greatest and highest objects in the pursuit of which wise men pass their lives: for he had made it his aim to be a most outstanding warrior, a supreme orator and a very brave commander, to be in charge of operations of the highest importance, to enjoy the greatest honour, to be supremely wise, to be deemed the most eminent senator, to obtain great wealth in an honourable way, to leave many children, and to achieve supreme distinction in the civic community.]

However, what exactly constituted a good public speaker remained controversial. Was (for instance) superior rhetorical skill more important than sound moral conviction? Under the influence of Greek rhetorical thought, the tension between technical proficiency and authoritative ethics acquired a cross-cultural complexion. When Cato the Elder (234–149 BCE) defined the orator as ‘a good man who knows how to speak’ (vir bonus dicendi peritus) he polemically asserted that the ability to coruscate with words was of secondary importance to the moral fiber of the speaker: no amount of sparkle, brilliance, and sophistication in the use of language can elevate a wordsmith to the status of an orator if he lacked proper ethics. In another adage — ‘stick to the topic, the words will follow’: rem tene, verba sequentur — Cato suggests that no formal training in rhetoric at all was needed to be a public speaker of substance.

To what extent he was representative of the first half of the second century BCE is difficult to determine, but by the late republic training in Greek and Latin rhetoric, including study trips to Greece, were part and parcel of an elite Roman education.33 Still, Greek rhetorical theory and technique retained their potentially problematic quality in Roman oratorical practice. In Cicero’s dialogue On the Ideal Orator (de Oratore), written in the mid-50s BCE, one of the characters, Antonius (the grandfather of Mark Antony) maintains that any semblance of learning is best avoided, especially in speeches addressed to a wider public. Cicero himself, throughout his life, was invested in rhetorical education and the figure of the ideal orator (summus orator), who in his view combined wisdom (sapientia) with eloquence (eloquentia) and was equally versed in the best that Greek culture had to offer (in both rhetoric and philosophy) as well as the ancestral traditions of Rome. (Indeed, the way he put it, the best insights of Greek philosophy, especially in matters of ethics and statesmanship, were simply the articulation in discourse of what the Roman ancestors had previously realized and enacted in practice.) Even though Cicero argued that his engagement with Greek cultural resources happened in the spirit of imperial co-option and emulation, his ‘intellectual’ preferences rendered him vulnerable to scorn. In his Anti-Cato, a treatise written in response to Cicero’s praise of the republican hero Cato the Younger (95–46 BCE), Caesar included a plea to the reader (Plutarch, Life of Julius Caesar 3.4):34

And thus, at a later time, Caesar himself, in his reply to Cicero’s Cato, begged that the discourse of a soldier not be judged by the standards of clever eloquence achieved by a rhetor who was naturally gifted and had plenty of free time to pursue his studies.

Caesar here brings into play the antithesis between himself, a man of action and of the army, and the ‘born rhetor’ Cicero. In Rome, the pinnacle of glory resided in military success, and Caesar thus implies that his antagonist, unlike himself, is a vir non vere Romanus (‘not a genuine Roman man’). He tops his slyly offensive characterization of Cicero as a clever man of the word by suggesting that his own rise to power, which coincided with the cessation of republican politics, created the perfect condition for Cicero to do what he does best. With him in charge, Cicero had the necessary leisure to pursue his natural calling, which Caesar locates in the field of rhetoric and literature, rather than politics or the military. He thereby maliciously insinuates that Cicero’s retirement from politics, while perhaps stripping him of the trappings of his Roman identity, has brought him back in touch with his true nature. The larger cultural polarity between the Roman doer and the Greek thinker gives added force to these polemics. In effect, Caesar’s characterization of Cicero as a ‘born’ rhetor brands the former pater patriae and senatorial colleague as someone who is, in essence, a Greek. Shakespeare picks up on this, when he makes Cicero pretentiously speak Greek — and hence remains incomprehensible to an uneducated Roman like Casca, to whom everything Cicero said was, indeed, Greek.

Antony, too, was an orator of distinction, who received the traditional training of a member of Rome’s ruling elite — and who also continued to hone his rhetorical talents through special tuition later in life.35 In a letter to Q. Thermus (Fam. 2.18 = 115 SB, early May 50), Cicero himself refers to him and his two brothers as summo loco natos, promptos, non indisertos (‘of the highest birth and no mean qualities of enterprise and eloquence’) — not people one would want to cross needlessly. Antony certainly knew how to excite a crowd — as he proved when he delivered the funeral oration for Caesar.36 This may well count as ‘the apogee of Antony’s oratory’ for those with a soft spot for Shakespeare, who re-imagines the performance as follows (Julius Caesar 3.2.73–107):37

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interred with their bones;

So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus

Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:

If it were so, it was a grievous fault,

And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.

Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest –

For Brutus is an honourable man;

So are they all, all honourable men — 

Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.

He was my friend, faithful and just to me;

But Brutus says he was ambitious;

And Brutus is an honourable man.

He hath brought many captives home to Rome

Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill;

Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?

When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;

And Brutus is an honourable man.

You all did see that on the Lupercal

I thrice presented him a kingly crown,

Which he did thrice refuse. Was this ambition?

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;

And, sure, he is an honourable man.

I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,

But here I am to speak what I do know.

You all did love him once, not without cause:

What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?

O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,

And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;

My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,

And I must pause till it come back to me.

Oratory is one of the main battlegrounds in Philippics 2. Cicero claims that Antony falls woefully short of the ideal, despite investing an enormous amount of money in substandard tuition. He mocks him for lack of natural ability and the hiring of second-rate teachers, who nevertheless get rewarded handsomely from the public purse. Put bluntly, he wants to shut him up for good.

‘Antony’s Oration Over Caesar’s Body’, from: Edward Sylvester Ellis, The Story of the Greatest Nations, from the Dawn of History to the Twentieth Century (1900).38

2.2 Invective

Ancient rhetorical theory distinguishes three branches of oratory: forensic or judicial (employed in court, as part of a trial), deliberative (used to sway an audience on a matter of public policy; in Rome the two primary settings were the Forum and the senate), and epideictic (a ceremonial verbal display, often with the purpose of dispensing blame or praise — as in a funeral oration). This rough-and-ready grid is useful as a basic orientation — but does not get us all that far with such an idiosyncratic text as Philippic 2: a written pamphlet that pretends to be the record of an epideictic (or deliberative?) speech delivered in the senate, put into circulation to persuade other members of Rome’s ruling elite to pursue a specific course of political action. To come to critical terms with this particular ‘oration’ it is arguably more promising to focus on the dominant ‘mode of discourse’, rather than the genre of oratory that Cicero chose for the occasion, i.e. invective. Invective is best defined by its primary purpose: character assassination through verbal abuse.39 Invective speech operates across genres: as a means of discrediting opponents, it can (and does) occur in all three branches of oratory (as well as other literary forms: it is, for instance, prevalent in old comedy and satire, but also appears in other types of poetry and prose).

Invective’s truth

Invective speech has a complex relationship with reality, especially in a culture without libel laws as that of ancient Rome. The principle ‘anything goes’ applied: as in contemporary ‘roast comedy’ any kind of insult and incrimination, however untrue, outrageous, or defamatory, was generally speaking fair game. Unlike contemporary roasting shows, however, the point of the abuse was to degrade the target for real — though (and here the roast parallel holds again), the most potent form of abuse managed to combine hard-hitting humiliation with (a nasty sense of) humour. Thus in the speech on behalf of Caelius, which contains a similar invective assault as Philippic 2 (directed against Clodius’ wife Clodia, who was a witness for the prosecution), Cicero distinguishes between boorish abuse and the urbane sophistication of a creative tongue-lashing. Those prosecuting his client, he suggests, are guilty of the former. By implication, he considered himself second to none in delivering the latter.40 Cicero was fully cognizant of the important contribution the eliciting of laughter can make to effective communication — and had a reputation for his merciless mocking and poisonous (if entertaining) put-downs.41 Indeed, ‘murderous wit’ is one of the qualities that Stockton identifies as hallmarks of Ciceronian invective — together with ‘coarse raillery’, ‘pained incredulity’, ‘destructive logic’, and ‘moral fervour’.42

While much invective, then, is gleefully mendacious as it opts for the sleazy, the sensational, and the scandalous in its pursuit of vituperative s/laughter, it nevertheless operates under the pretence that it tells the truth. Invective discourse postures as a particular form of free speech — one that tears away veneers of respectability to expose and ridicule the hidden reality underneath. To some extent it is therefore pointless to enquire into the referential value of invective assertions designed not to give an accurate depiction of an individual’s life or character, but to turn him into a kind of person you would not want to have in your community. Credibility in invective has little to do with checking facts or vetting evidence: a semblance of plausibility is all that is needed for even the most outrageous (and uproarious) insults to go forward: it is above all a creative, not primarily a representational mode of discourse. At the same time, invective mud sticks better if there is some connection with established facts. The abuse that Cicero attracted, for instance, tended to play off his relatively humble social background and place of origin (a new man from Arpinum), his actions as consul (the illegal executions of Roman citizens without trial), his endeavours to aggrandize himself, be it through the purchase of a magnificent villa on the Palatine, or through the insistent self-praise in his poetry.43 So ‘rather than saying that the truth of invective allegations is irrelevant, we may more accurately say that it is of secondary importance’.44

Even so, by flouting standards of discursive decency, feeding on preconceptions, and pandering to prejudices, invective generates its own reality in and through rhetoric. And it is up to the audience, i.e. you, whether you want to buy into it or rather insist on a quick ‘fact check’, so as not to succumb to ‘fake news’ and incendiary spin…

Invective’s impact

Given the highly conventional and plainly imaginary elements of political invective in republican Rome, one may wonder to what extent verbal attacks, however vile and vitriolic, permanently dented anybody’s reputation. Perhaps the consequences of unleashing aspersion upon an aristocratic peer happened to be relatively minor: a jeer and chuckle here, some rise in blood pressure and temporary irritation there, but overall a routine part of the political game, a ritual flyting exercise that consisted in the anodyne traffic of predictable insults that had the status of tired clichés and yawn-inducing commonplaces. The ‘no hard feelings’ attitude may well have prevailed in some cases. But to imply, as some scholars have done, that invective never did any significant damage arguably underestimates its ability to leave a mark on inner-aristocratic interactions. Its conventional nature does not exclude impact (not least since many blows in these verbal punch-ups were designed to land below the belt). As John Henderson (2006: 142–43) puts it:

Invective is all about getting retaliation in first — pinch, punch, and no returns! Reliant on expected moves, and on their anticipation, this lobbing of rotten tomatoes is expressive behaviour, semi-un-trammelled by the constraints of ‘proper conduct’, and risking real enough social-political ‘face’ in the clubhouse of Roman prestige: the casement of epideictic braggadocio cushioned plenty, but nevertheless however playfully traded clichés could at (all) times land wounds, brand butts, kick ass.

How could a speaker know that he was not playing with fire — about to start a feud, go beyond the pale, or, indeed, sign his death sentence?45 Language matters.

Invective’s (dys-)function

By purporting to diagnose deviance, invective discourse illuminates the norms, values, and expectations of a civic community — as well as associated fears and anxieties. It stigmatizes difference and ostracizes those whom it perceives to fall short of community standards. As such, one could argue that invective had an important role to play in policing the boundaries of a civic community — as much recent scholarship has done, ably summarized by Arena:46

Invective also had the potential to reshape and remodel the ethical and political code of society by expelling its deviant elements (or at least by trying to do so; see Ruffell 2003). As Corbeill (1996) argues, through his use of invective the orator acts as a definer of his society’s moral code. Indeed, given Roman society’s lack of canonical moral texts, invective had an important social function to play through its highlighting of virtue and vice. Although it was designed to humiliate the opponent in front of the community, invective also helped, through its enumeration of negative qualities, to shape examples of virtues (cf. e.g. Rhet. Her. 3.11).

True, a speaker will always portray his decision to abuse as being motivated by concerns for the community, civic welfare, and a commitment to the truth: anything else would be counterproductive. The target has to be shamed, ostracized, or indeed killed for the common good. But it is important to bear in mind that invective invents just as much as it represents: it is part of a struggle over the definition of reality. We should therefore not necessarily presuppose that invective is always functional, that such muscular managers of meaning as Cicero who define who is in and who is out do a service to their community in identifying ‘deviant elements’ within that ought to be expelled. In light of our earlier discussion, we should perhaps also entertain the possibility that invective brings deviance into being — and in doing so can be dysfunctional, insofar as it aggravates tensions and divisions within a civic community. After all, character assassination is a mode of (verbal) warfare. As Icks and Shiraev (2014b: 1) put it in their introduction to a volume on this phenomenon:

Throughout history, people have used the torch, the pitchfork, the bullet, the cannon, and (recently) the missile to damage, destroy, and kill. To protect themselves from attacks, people have built shields, armor, trenches, and fortresses, established military doctrines, and launched counterattacks. This book discusses attacks and defenses. Yet we have turned our attention to the destructive power of a different kind: words and images. Across countries and time, people have used images and words to harm, devastate, and completely destroy other people’s reputation, status, and character.

Viewed in this light, invective becomes the rhetorical equivalent of civil warfare. Cicero’s oratory arguably helped pave the way for an (even) ‘nastier, more divided’ Rome.

2.3 Cicero’s Antony: Or How to Other a Peer

The ‘identity’ of a person is a composite and multifaceted phenomenon — despite the etymology of the term (identitas = ‘the quality of being always the same’). Some aspects of who we are (or perceive ourselves to be) are generic (gender, ethnicity, nationality, legal status), others unique (family background, biography, or personal traits). Despite undeniable elements of continuity, our identity is under continual negotiation — both for ourselves and for others: indeed, identities are just as much a matter of self-perception as how we are perceived by others: and the two perspectives need not necessarily (indeed rarely do) fully coincide. Identities can be negotiated and challenged in discourse — and that is where invective rhetoric, and its potentially transformative power, comes in: it tries to strip the individual under attack of the positive aspects of their identity — of who they are in their own eyes and those of others.

The identity sapping of invective discourse can take various forms. In the Philippics, Cicero opts for a combination of remorseless ridicule and drastic demonization. Antony is a fool — but a dangerous one: to be laughed at, savagely, but then to be terminated. As Hall (2002: 288) observes, perhaps downplaying the demonizing that is also part of Philippic 2:

Antony is portrayed through this rhetoric of crisis as a violent, dangerous man who must be vigorously resisted. On other occasions, however, Cicero sets out to undermine Antony’s moral and political authority through mockery. The most famous examples appear in the invective of Philippic 2, where the principal aim is to characterize Antony not as dangerous but as ridiculous; as a man of unparalleled levitas, quite unworthy of respect or admiration.

Antony is at the same time monstrous and malevolent, preposterous and pathetic. And at the heart of Cicero’s verbal assault on Antony is a systematic ‘othering’ of his adversary, a transformation of a member of Rome’s ruling elite, an aristocratic peer, into the veritable opposite:

Identity Facet	Historical Facts	Invective Fiction
Family pedigree	nobilitas	degenerate offshoot of a distinguished family
Degree of intelligence	high IQ, gifted political and military operator	doltish dim-wit (stultus)
Rhetorical ability	distinguished orator	a stammering failure (balbulus)
Habitual disposition	(by and large) sober (sobrius)	alcoholic (vinolentus) with emetic tendencies (vomitator)
Mental qualities and moral outlook	compos mentis | vir bonus | in (rational) control of his self	furiosus; creature of base instincts and appetites: gluttony, gambling, drinking, debauchery; vir turpis
Gender	Male (vir)	Effeminized / female (cinaedus; meretrix, matrona)
Ethnic background	Romanus	barbarus
Religious position / status	augur	perpetrator of impieties (sacrilegus)
Legal status	Roman citizen (civis Romanus)	external enemy (hostis)
Socio-political roles	patronus and consul	tyrannus / rex
Network of acquaintances	other members of Rome’s ruling elite; clients	latrones (‘brigands) and lenones (‘pimps’), mime actors and mime actresses > scum
Species	homo	subhuman monster (belua)

Cicero questions Antony’s morals, masculinity, and maleness (vir, virtus) by imagining a lurid past as toy-boy (puer) and male prostitute (cinaedus, meretrix). In sharp contrast to his role as augur (a priestly office), he charges him with the perpetration of impieties. Rejecting his identity as a Roman (Romanus), he highlights his affiliation with barbarians (barbarus). Instead of a sober senator exercising the self-control expected of a member of Rome’s ruling elite, Antony comes across as a permanently intoxicated alcoholic (vinolentus), with strong emetic tendencies also in public (vomitator). Given the kind of person he is, the company he keeps is unsurprisingly equally depraved. He consorts with scum, ‘attends birthday parties of professional clowns’ (Hall 2002: 289 on Phil. 2.15), and has a love affair with the mime-actress Cytheris. Far from being a well-trained public speaker (orator), he is a linguistically challenged failure who stammers along (balbulus) and is stupid to boot (stultus). Yet, despite all of these personal failings, he is technically speaking consul, a high magistrate of the Roman people: in other words, he is an empowered pervert, whom Cicero identifies and outs not just as spitting counter-image of a member of Rome’s ruling elite, but its mortal enemy. His verbal annihilation of Antony is not an end in itself: Cicero turns the skewering of the would-be tyrant who beleaguers the city with his soldiers into a rousing cry for (senatorial) freedom.

Much of Cicero’s invective operates at the level of personal insults: Antony, he argues, is plain stupid and devoid of (oratorical) talent, but the focal point of his attack is an overall lack of self-control, which manifests itself in all areas where appetites are involved, in particular food, drink, and sex. Antony is a creature of base instinct, leading a life devoted to gluttony, gambling, drinking, and debauchery. A paradox emerges: a Roman man and magistrate ought to exercise legitimate power over others (the potestas of a paterfamilias and consul); but Antony is not even able to exercise power over himself. Cicero renders the paradox explicit at Phil. 6.4, where he mocks the notion that someone like Antony would listen to a senatorial embassy:

Facile vero huic denuntiationi parebit, ut in patrum conscriptorum atque in vestra potestate sit, qui in sua numquam fuerit! quid enim ille umquam arbitrio suo fecit? semper eo tractus est, quo libido rapuit, quo levitas, quo furor, quo vinulentia; semper eum duo dissimilia genera tenuerunt, lenonum et latronum; ita domesticis stupris, forensibus parricidiis delectatur, ut mulieri citius avarissimae paruerit quam senatui populoque Romano.

[He will no doubt readily obey this intimation, so as to submit to the conscript fathers and your power — a man who has never had himself in his power! For what has that man ever done on his own initiative? He has always been dragged where lust, where levity, where frenzy, where intoxication, has dragged him; two different classes of men have always held him in their grip, pimps and brigands. He so enjoys lecheries at home and murders in the forum that he would sooner obey a most avaricious woman than the senate and the Roman people.]

As this and other similar passages (not least from Philippic 2) are designed to illustrate, any ability Antony may have had to assert himself is severely compromised by base appetites, emotions, or character faults (sexual desire, fickleness, insanity, alcohol-addiction) and the ill-reputed company he keeps (pimps, brigands, a depraved wife). Since Antony is unable to exercise the requisite power (potestas) over his instincts and associates, he is unwilling to accept the legitimate power (potestas) of the senate and the people of Rome — instead, he remains beholden to the wrong people, a weak-kneed slave of his desires. Moreover, the depravity of Antony manifests itself in equal measure in the domestic sphere (in the form of acts of sexual transgressions: stupra) and the civic realm (murders in the forum: parricidia).

In Cicero’s view, to have someone like Antony as consul (and, soon, pro-consul) poses an existential threat to the senatorial tradition of republican government. According to him, Antony has forfeited his right to be a member of Rome’s ruling elite, indeed to be a part of Roman society or even the human species. The attack on the mainstays of Antony’s identity — his status as vir, nobilis, orator, augur, consul, civis Romanus — culminates in Cicero’s denial of his humanity. As Santoro L’Hoir (1992: 26) observes:

Cicero fires his ultimate blast of vitriol in his glorious last stand against Antony. Like his predecessors Verres and Clodius, Antony is a homo amentissimus (Phil. 2.42; 5.37; cf. 3.2), and a homo audacissimus (2.78; 5.13; 6.2). He is, furthermore: h. acutus (2.28); h. adflictus et perditus (3.25); h. detestabilis (2.110); h. impotentissimus (5.42); h. ingratissimus (13.41); h. nequam and nequissimus (2.56; 61; 70; 78); h. numquam sobrius (2.81); h. perditissimus (5.13); h. profligatus (3.1); h. sceleratus (4.12); h. simplex (2.111); h. stupidus (3.22); h. turpissimus (2.105); h. vehemens et violentus (5.19), among others. At one point, Antony ranks even lower than a homo: Non est vobis res, Quirites, cum scelerato homine ac nefario, sed cum immani taetraque belua! (Phil. 4.12: ‘You have not now to deal, Romans, with a man merely guilty and villainous, but with a monstrous and savage beast’).

Like his other adversaries (Verres, Catiline, Clodius, Piso and Gabinius, occasionally also Caesar) Cicero thus dehumanizes Antony. He casts him as a monstrous, amoral pervert, hell-bent on subverting Rome’s social institutions and its political culture. He turns Antony into a repellent beast to instigate and rationalize drastic political action against him, turning him into an outlaw, foreigner, enemy, subhuman, who has lost the protection afforded by law, by his status as a Roman citizen, and by being human.

3. Why Read Cicero’s Second Philippic Today?

‘Classical’ texts, or at least those we consider classical that have come to us from Greco-Roman antiquity, are texts that have managed to outlive the immediate historical context or even wider culture for which they were originally intended, attracting ever-new audiences down the ages. At times, such texts are simply read because they have been accorded the status of ‘classical’ at some point in the past. This, however, is a rather weak justification for continuing to read them — it might imply being in thoughtless thrall of choices that earlier generations have made for us. It is, therefore, always a good idea to ponder what makes the Greek or Latin text you have been asked to read (or happen to be reading: no need to stick to the syllabus) particularly relevant in the here-and-now. The following offers some suggestions of why at present Philippic 2 might be particularly good to think with.

3.1 Extremist Politics and the Rhetoric of Crisis

Philippic 2 bears witness to a desperately divided political community (and in particular its ruling elite), in which different interest groups struggled over the definition of facts and figures in increasingly polarized ways. At issue was, not least, the interpretation of Caesar and his assassination: was he a tyrant justly slain by a group of determined freedom fighters or a benefactor murdered by a bunch of treacherous ingrates? Or was there perhaps a middle way — the possibility of amnesty and reconciliation, rather than retaliation and further bloodshed? In this embittered battleground over the meaning of recent events, Cicero uses Philippic 2 to position himself as an extremist voice. In the first half of the speech he flatly denies the possibility of a middle ground when it comes to assessing the assassins (§§ 30–31). And in the second half (and the rest of the corpus) he opts for a ‘rhetoric of crisis’ that precludes compromise and furthers confrontation. As Wooten (1983: 58) explains:

One of the most striking characteristics, therefore, of the rhetoric of crisis is the clarity and simplicity with which the orator views the situation that he faces. To him the contest is black and white, the struggle of good against evil; and what is at stake, he argues, is the very existence of the civilization that he is defending. He tries to convince the members of his audience that the history of their state has reached a fundamental crisis in which its very existence as they know it and everything that it represents are in danger. He then presents the situation as a clear choice between mutually exclusive and fundamentally opposed systems by means of what may be called the disjunctive mode.

Increasingly polarized political discourse, the attendant loss of a middle ground that cultivates commonly shared views and values as basis for compromise, and the rhetoric of crisis and existential emergency are phenomena that many political pundits also see on the rise in contemporary society and politics. One particularly intriguing question here again involves the power of rhetoric: to what extent does the language of crisis help produce — rather than react to — the problem it tries to fight?

3.2 Hate Speech

In a recent monograph on Cicero, Tahin draws a comparison between the public use of language in Greco-Roman antiquity and today:47

It is crucial to state that a Greek or Roman orator was not bound by any modern standard of rationality, logic or rhetorical measure unless the circumstances of a particular case demanded it in order to win the case. Forms of argument (such as personal abuse, distortion or omission of facts, malicious slander, irrelevant details or sequences of narrative, logical non sequitur, counter accusations) which today are considered fallacious or inadmissible elements of reasoning in any rational discourse (e.g. court hearings) were widely accepted tools of persuasion so long as they served the purposes of the orator.

The thought that we moderns live in a more enlightened and civilized age than the Greeks and the Romans is reassuring. And it is true that we possess libel laws. But recent developments may well prompt us to wonder about ‘modern standards of rationality, logic or rhetorical measure’, which may indeed be ruled out of court, but seem to thrive in the Bloggosphere and on Twitter — as well as more generally. The protocols of public discourse seem to have become more fluid in recent years, the boundary between the sayable and the unspeakable are shifting. We seem to have a heightened awareness of the fact that words can hurt, that there is a need for sensitive use of language and safe spaces, yet all the while crudity and extremism proliferate in public discourse, including the criminalization of adversaries: judges who come up with an inopportune ruling are labelled ‘enemies of the people’, politicians who beg to differ from the party line run the risk of being turned into ‘traitors’.

Throw in the phenomenon of factoids and invented facts broadcast as news and parallels worth pondering between late-republican Rome and contemporary politics are not all that hard to come by, especially when it comes to abusive language (or hate speech). Invective blurs the distinction between truth and lies, reality and fiction. Much of what Cicero says in Philippic 2 is ‘fake news’ or malicious spin, served up in the service of a higher truth, a code of civic ethics. Does the end justify the means?

3.3 The Power of Eloquence and Post-Truth Politics

Cicero conceived of the Philippics as monumental oratory — his rhetorical testament as it were: ‘Invoking the dangers he submits to as well as his contempt for death, a Leitmotiv in the Philippics, Cicero not only amplifies and dramatises the contemporary political situation, but he refashions it into the time-transcending narrative of a man desperately but resolutely fighting for his convictions. Thus Cicero ensures that his speeches would be read long after the conflict had been resolved and, more importantly, even in case Antony prevailed’.48 While he failed in his efforts to restore republican freedom to the Roman commonwealth, he certainly succeeded in bequeathing his vision (of himself, of Antony, of the world) to posterity. What remains are his writings: they articulate an (arguably tragic) vision of resistance against (perceived) tyranny and constitute a type of political activism and civic commitment in a time of chaos, when constitutional safeguards and institutions, legal procedures and republican norms arguably no longer guaranteed the survival of the senatorial commonwealth. (What do you think: does Cicero take a courageous stance against tyranny here or is he a deluded and self-righteous warmonger who tries to rip Antony’s heart out while shooting himself in the foot?)

As a (now classical) speech-act of universalizing import, Philippic 2 invites questions of a trans-historical nature: about the judgment of the author, the secrets of persuasive oratory, the power of spin, the divisive impact of hate-speech and its relation to physical violence, to name a few. Cicero was a master of (re-)defining reality — indeed inventing it — whenever the facts did not suit his purpose. In the Philippics, he generated a largely imaginary character portrait and corresponding curriculum vitae of Antony, which he embedded within a narrative on Roman politics to produce a moment of existential crisis, of bare survival, of life or death for each individual and the civic community at large — a favourite script of his, in which he invested throughout his career. The text to be studied is both a sensational exercise of dragging someone’s reputation through the sewer and a fantastic illustration of how Cicero managed to make an impact on, indeed invent, reality through his rhetorical skills and the powers of his imagination. Cicero’s approach in Philippic 2 thus arguably has certain affinities with contemporary variants of ‘post-truth’ politics, in which decency, respect for one’s opponents, and cultivation of civilized language give way to polarizing abuse. In Cicero’s case, the abuse has become classical — should it continue to inspire?

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